Most of them really didn't understand what they were fighting for. Personally, they fought for adventure, class and economic opportunity, pride, peer pressure, or because they were compelled. They fought against miscegenation, "invasion," and so forth, the usual human tribal tendencies. Mush of the impetus to fight was born of rhetoric that little to do with reality.

Funny how times haven't changed, huh?

Meanwhile, when you look at the actually causes of the Civil War, though "self-determination" was a popular call, it was not the cause for the war. Maintaining the institution of slavery was the main cause of the war. Nothing to brag about.

"Meanwhile, when you look at the actually causes of the Civil War, though "self-determination" was a popular call, it was not the cause for the war. Maintaining the institution of slavery was the main cause of the war."

One man's opinion. Definitely not an established fact, although it is one of several differing theories in academia.

Pseudo-intellectual boors will pick up one theory or another, as a child picks up an adult object, and attempt to appear intelligent and informed. As in the above example of Mr. Mc Jones, it rarely succeeds.

The War Between the States was NOT started and NOT fought to END slavery. It came about, because of the dispute over the SPREADING of slavery to new U.S. territories opening up in the then-rapidly-expanding still-new nation.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation came AFTER the war was well under way. It was more a TACTIC he used to demoralize the Confederacy than anything else –– a bold assertion that HE, Abraham Lincoln and the Central Government in the District of Columbia were STILL very much in charge.

By today's standards the undeservedly-sainted Lincoln was every bit as much a "racist" as any Southern Plantation owner, as the following will amply attest:

“I will say that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superiour and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Those who voted for Maryland to remain in the Union did not at first contemplate the emancipation of Maryland's many slaves, or indeed those of the Confederacy. In March 1862 the Maryland Assembly passed a series of resolutions, stating that:

This war is prosecuted by the Nation with but one object, that, namely, of a restoration of the Union just as it was when the rebellion broke out. The rebellious States are to be brought back to their places in the Union, without change or diminution of their constitutional rights.[59]

In other words, as far as Marylanders were concerned, the war was being fought over Union, not over slavery. And, because Maryland had remained in the Union, the state was not included under the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that all slaves within the Confederacy (but not those in border states like Maryland) would henceforth be free. It was not until 1864 that a constitutional convention was held which would address the issue of slavery in Maryland.

What prompted the confederacy states to secede? My incomplete understanding (I've only read a handful of articles on your civil war) is that South Carolina, for example, craved greater legislative freedom to control her slaves. Were there other reasons?

As for self determination, sure. The north used force to stop the confederates seceding, a clear denial of self-determination. The reason I wouldn't apply the term here is the obvious: they intended to withhold any powers of determination from their slaves, and for that let me, without bellowing anything, register my disgust.

They called themselves the "Union Army"... NOT "the Army of Southern Slave Liberation".

And it's funny how the damn Yankess never question their own motives, especially since they were the first to "consider" secession. Seems those in Connecticut didn't object to "slavery" so much as the 3/5 advantage slavery gave to southern states in the election franchise.

drom the Wiki link above: Historian Sean Wilentz noted that in recent times it has become popular to link the Federalists' antiwar platform to a humanitarian opposition to slavery. Wilentz, however, looks at the issue as strictly a matter of securing political power for New England. He writes:

Although public attacks on the planters for their immorality and hypocrisy added to the Yankee Federalists' treasury of moral virtue, those attacks often expressed little concern about the slaves, or about slavery as an institution. The Federalists did not hate the Jeffersonians out of antislavery conviction; rather, they sometimes took antislavery positions because they hated the "Jacobin" Jeffersonians.

You may register as much disgust as you can conjur up, Jez, but the fact remains you fell into the trap –– as so many self-righteous, liberal-progressive, and natural-born busybodies do –– of judging former times by contemporary standards.

The southern congressman who brutally beat the arrogant, self-righteous Abolitionist Charles Sumner half to death on the floor of the Senate in the late 1850's made an excellent point at the time, when he reminded Sumner that tens of thousands of universally despised, rejected and mistreated Irish immigrants were literally staring to death in the streets of Boston while Sumner was haughtily denouncing the evils of slavery in the way that only morally blind fanatics could possibly muster. Sumner's attacker's point was that southern slave owners regarded their slaves as a valuable investment, and therefore treated them far more generously and humanely than arrogant, conceited Bostonians did the unfortunate Irish.

Of course beating a man half to death because you find his views abhorrent is hardly laudable, but Sumner's attacker was regarded as a HERO in the South and escaped any kind of punishment concomitant with his crime from the congress as a whole.

As I indicated earlier, it was a very different world in the 1850's than the one we inhabit today.

Disgust is not conjured, it is involuntary.I'm no longer surprised by that men living in Victorian times held Victorian-era views, but I still react to them as myself. Do you believe it is possible to avoid judging former times by our own standards? Do you know any historians who do this? I don't, and as a result I actually find the history of history to be almost as interesting as history itself -- the way an era interprets the preceding ones (judging them by its own standards) can sometimes expose that era's prevailing attitudes more clearly than studying it directly.Not that I'm any great historian. I'm not sure history makes it into my top ten interests. :)I was not familiar with that story (like I said, very incomplete knowledge) but I do not hesitate to judge it by my own personal standards, to be honest I can't imagine what it would be like not to do so.

Then you admit your opinions on historical issues of this sort are based purely on subjective emotion, is that right, Jez? It's all right, as you know, I believe along with Hume that Reason functions primarily as the Slave of Passion anyway.

One of the gifts possessed by poets, novelists and dramatists is a keen ability to use their imagination well enough to perceive the world through many different pairs of eyes and ears.

Composers of music of substance have this same gift, but use it to capture and synthesize images, feelings and perceptions then translate them into concentrated blocks of sound that transmit and evoke the composer's unique understanding in a ways that awaken it in others.

All that aside, if one hopes to understand the past, I believe it necessary to make every attempt to examine it with an attitude as close as possible to those who experienced it.

A small for instance: Not so very long ago it was considered perfectly normal, right and good for a father to marry off his 14 or 15 year old daughter to a widower in his thirties with several young children from a deceased wife left to raise. The young teenager would have little or nothing to say in the matter. Usually such arrangements worked out all right, simply because they HAD to. There were no reasonable alternatives for the teen-aged girl.

Today we would call that "Child Abuse" and prosecute the men involved with all the wild-eyedc zeal that Savonarola prosecuted "heretics."

Times change. Societal attitudes evolve, but there will always be something someone finds abhorrent and unacceptable.

I feel that way about MUSLIMS. I hate the way they treat their women and children. I hate their irrational hatred of me, my culture and my kind, I hate their lack of respect for and destructive intentions towards art and artifacts from cultures not their own, etc. but I do not believe it should be MY business to invade THEIR lands in order to CORRECT their vile behavior.

As I've said ad nauseam, I believe it SHOULD be OUR business to EXPEL Islam and it adherents from the West, and do everything possible keep them OUT of OUR lands.

Anyone who willingly nurses a viper on his bosom DESERVES to be KILLED.

Another example from the past is the way the ancient Romans enjoyed the carryings-on in the Colosseum. To us it is unspeakable horror. To them it was "good entertainment."

That doesn't make brutal forms of torture, gladiatorial combat and watching wild beasts tear defenseless human beings to bloody shreds a right or good thing, but if we want to understand the prevailing mentality at the time, we MUST understand that the ROMANS regarded these dreadful things as perfectly NORMAL.

Fortunately, all that disappeared with the passage of time –– as did The Black Death that later terrorized Europe and killed off huge segments of the population for a very long time.

Freethinke, out of "based purely on subjective emotion," I agree with "subjective".

I believe that all true art is in some sense autobiography.

"if we want to understand the prevailing mentality at the time, we MUST understand that the ROMANS regarded these dreadful things as perfectly NORMAL."Of course, that's what I meant about not being surprised by Victorian attitudes. But, honestly, even if I tried really hard, I could not suppress my my moral reaction to the Roman circuses. Is it worth the doomed effort to try? I think, may as well just acknowledge it: my interpretation of the past will be unavoidably a product of my own time.

Striving to be seen as multicultural is considered a virtue in our times. So why not multi-temporalism? For multitemporalism was once the outcome of a classical education, and a lack of sympathy for the Greek or Roman the ultimate ignorance.

I hope you don't think I see any good in the Circus Maximus or in Slavery, Jez? I only think it's important and very necessary to accept the knowledge that those responsible for those things saw life from a radically different perspective than Civilized Man in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

We cannot hold figures from the past responsible for not seeing things OUR way. The modern tendency to BESMIRCH iconic individuals like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and NEGATE all the good that was in them just because they held slaves is as idiotic as it is unfair.

Genesis 9:25-27: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. He also said, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japeth live in the tents of Shem and may Canaan be his slave'. "

I hope you don't think I see only bad in folks like Washington and Jefferson, not that I know much about them (Franklin is my uninformed favourite). I won't patronise their memory by ignoring their flaws, nor Churchill's.Thersites: sure, I can rehearse some of the arguments in favour of the Roman Circus, but when it comes down to it I despise both the means (brutal entertainment to psychologically prepare young men for military adventure) and the ends (imperialism); I guess I'd have to be more sophisticated to be able to work up sympathy for that lot practice.

Not only that flag is racist, everything that reminds people of the old south is racist. All those big white houses with the columns and gardens, all those pictures of ladies in hoop skirts and gentleman in fancy clothes riding horses and sitting on verandahs, all those big fancy houses in Charleston and Savannah, those plantation houses on the James River, including Mount Vernon and Monticello are nothing but monuments to slavery and racism. Every last one of them should be burned to the ground. All pictures of them and all books written abput them should be burned too, and those lands should be converted into free housing for poor blacks and their children who should be paid by the government to life a life of ease and comfort forever. That would be the least whites could do to try to make up for their shameful past.

Not only that, but all those monuments to Civil War veterans should be smashed to rubble and carted away to make landfill for black housing projects all over the country.

The American flag too is really a symbol of racism and oppression. In fact this whole country is nothing but a reminder of the ugliness of white supremacist attitudes. Whites stole everything we have from the Native Americans and from the Mexicans ,and built the country on the whipped bleeding backs of blacks held in bondage.

There's a rottenness that runs through everything about this country. The U.S.A. whites are so proud of shouldn't even be allowed to exist anymore.

There's no going back, but restitution and reparations are possible. All Native Americans, African-Americans, and Latino Americans should band together and force the whites to liquidate at least sixty to eighty percent of what they have, and give it freely and humbly to the people they insulted, abused and exploited for centuries.

And if they don't, you can be sure we will take it from them and give them a dose of their own medicine. I'd love to see whites learn how it feels to be on the bottom and treated worse than most people treat animals.

"If we get caught, they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth so it doesn't matter what you do. America is the golden cow and we will suck it dry, chop it up and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left but the world's largest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it's God's will and America is big enough to take the hit and survive so we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries we hate. Destroy them very slowly and make the people suffer for refusing to be our slaves."

Mr. Waylon, you forget to mention that every member of the Frankfurt School was an ethnic Jew. In fact communism was mostly a Jewish invention. Lots of Jews were involved in the Russian Revolution, and Jews dominated all the early efforts to make Marxism popular.

Louie: Logical conclusion,sir. The Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were a Jewish plague imposed on Russia. From the outside. Trotsky had his ticket from New York purchased by a benevolent Jewish banker (Jacob Schiff) and Lenin sent from Switzerland.

Nobody ever said we were the perfect country. Is there one anywhere? We cannot move forward if we keep looking back or should I say keep living in the past. I am sure nobody that posts here agrees with slavery. Reparations have been given the last 60 years in the form of welfare,civil rights,and affirmative action. 2 wrongs don't make a right but forgiveness is more powerful and liberating than any amount of money. You might want to check out "the Railway Man"

But Lenin, himself, was not jewish, Waylon. Neither was Uncle Joe Stalin. Nether was Friedrich Engels for that matter, and the Jews, themselves, fervently deny that Marx was a Jew. They will tell you with a perfectly straight face that he was born a Lutheran.

I'm afraid that ALL peoples easily fall pray to the kind of fairy tales that tell them someone "ELSE" is responsible for the misery of their ignorant, impoverished lives, and that that Someone Else should be forced to PAY.

So far everyone has avoided recognizing this stupid Confederate Flag controversy as the RED HERRING it surely is.

The idea that a mere piece of CLOTH could be in any way responsible for the raving mad, murderous acts of a callow, uneducated, unsophisticated, doubtless drug-crazed young maniac is completely absurd, yet I have not heard ONE person even try to make that argument from either side of the Great Divide.

The above CARTOON does an excellent job of making this very necessary point with intelligence and good humor.

By the way, the flag in the picture above is the TRUE Stars and Bars –– the flag of the Confederate States of America. The banner now drawing so much unpopular attention based on the Cross of St. Andrew was designed as a BATTLE flag.

The desire to ASCRIBE the worst possible motives to a targeted symbol is characteristic of the Left in their relentless, bullying drive to acquire ABSOLUTE DICTATORIAL POWER.

Unless and until white males can drop their white, male privilege, progress will not be attained. This is priaptproptic and unassailable. Any countervailing argumentations are to be dismissed and pretermitated!

It is highly incumbent upon the modern-day cavemen whose dubious entitlement comes from pink skin and male genitalia, to abandon their attachments to racist accoutrements of the past and follow the lead of progressive men such as Jersey McJones, who understand and feel the shame they have earned for themselves, and who have nobly, deprecated their maleness and whiteness, and relegated these prefabricated cultural artifacts to the trash heap of history where they belong.

The idea that a mere piece of CLOTH could be in any way responsible for the raving mad, murderous acts of a callow, uneducated, unsophisticated, doubtless drug-crazed young maniac is completely absurd...

We should also remember the following: holding slaves was Constitutional until slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, a Reconstruction amendment, was passed in 1865 after the war ended.

BTW, the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in this manner only: in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863. Slaves elsewhere in the United States were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

The man accused of killing nine people in a historically black church in South Carolina last month should not have been able to buy the gun he used in the attack, the F.B.I. said Friday, in what was the latest acknowledgment of flaws in the national background check system.

[...]

In the case of Mr. Roof, the F.B.I. failed to gain access to a police report in which he admitted to having been in possession of a controlled substance, which would have disqualified him from purchasing the weapon. The F.B.I. said that confusion about where the arrest had occurred had prevented it from acquiring the arrest record in a timely fashion.

Mr. Roof’s application was not resolved within the three-day limit because the F.B.I. was still trying to get the arrest record, and he returned to store and was sold the gun....

I must say that we're hearing a lot about flaws in computer systems being operated by the federal government. The latest OPM data breach, for example -- and it keeps growing and growing in severity of impact and numbers of those whose data have been compromised.

Unfortunately for too long the roads leading us to our terminal destination today have had sign posts that too many have blown off and dismissed as being wrong because it seemed to be just too evil to believe. Today the media simply reacts to concocted events. And most react as expected by those manipulative geniuses pulling the strings for the media whores.

Just to underline that this is an old plan that has been fine tuned over the decades it's interesting to observe the in-breeding and cross-dressing that occurs between the likes of Bertrand Russel and old British Fabian Socialist and his connections to the Frankfurt School ...

"Lord Bertrand Russell joined with the Frankfurt School in their effort at mass social engineering and spilled the beans in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society. He wrote: ‘Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development.' The importance of mass psychology ‘has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray . When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."

So what does this all mean, Alfie?

Very likely that the Fabian Socialist, the Bosheviks and the Frankfurt School academy were and are all on the same team. Better to understand your enemies, idntify them and keep your powder dry.

I agree with most of your statement, Waylon, although I believe that while the Bolsheviks, the Fabians, the Progressives, the Liberals and today's Democrats may all be branches of the same tree or products f the same rootstock, I doubt if there was any organized conspiracy among them.

I believe the evils of Collectivism came about as a direct result of the evils spawned by the Industrial Revolution.

I'm heartened to see by means of your illustration that you actually know the difference between the flag of the Confederate States of America and the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia... BRAVO!

-The Memphis City Council unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday to move the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from Health Sciences Park.

They have been buried in a park on Union Avenue for 110 years.

Council members are also moving ahead with plans to remove the statue of Forrest, even looking at selling the statue to anyone who wants it.

"The Forrest family is solidly opposed to digging up the graves and moving them any place," said Lee Millar with the Son’s Of Confederate Veterans."...

Dig up remains which have been at rest for 110 years? Grave robbery!

As for Nathan Bedford Forrest himself, apparently THIS does not matter:

In July 1875, Forrest demonstrated that his personal sentiments on the issue of race now differed from that of the Klan, when he was invited to give a speech before an organization of black Southerners advocating racial reconciliation, called the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association. At this, his last public appearance, he made what the New York Times described as a "friendly speech"[10] during which, when offered a bouquet of flowers by a black woman, he accepted them as a token of reconciliation between the races and espoused a radical agenda (for the time) of equality and harmony between black and white Americans. His speech was as follows:...

The American flag represented an ideal--liberty and equality. It didn't always live up to those ideals, but this country struggled to achieve them; and by abolishing slavery, for example, America showed itself that it could become a more perfect union, as is stated in the preamble to the constitution.

You and others refuse to see that the stars and bars was a flag that was created as a symbol of white supremacy. The American flag, though created during the era of human bondage in this country, was not specifically designed to celebrate slavery.

I'm not hypocritical I can understand the difference between the two symbols. You can't.

Gratuitous Displays of Extraneous Knowledge Offered Not To Shed Light Or Enhance the Discussion, But For The Primary Purpose Of Giving An Impression Of Superiority are obnoxiously SELF-AGGRANDIZING, and therefore, Subject to Removal at the Discretion of the Censor-in-Residence.